It’s almost a relief that Ender’s Game has turned out to be a glum bore onscreen, a far-future cadets-in-space military drama whose pretensions to moral inquiry boil down to the guilt a kid may feel after stepping on an anthill. If the film had turned out grand, like the best…
This summer, Primary Projects teamed up with artists Typoe and Christina Gonzalez to take their Miami art mission to Chicago. The result: a shopping center covered in public art by the likes of FriendsWithYou, Jen Stark, and Bert Rodriguez. There was just one drawback: you had to travel all the…
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is the movie for people who think they’re too smart for The Butler. The story it tells, a true one, is horrifying: In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free, educated black man from Saratoga, New York, was kidnaped, sold into slavery, and transported to Louisiana…
Attention, children! Thanksgiving will soon be upon us, and unless the cook in your household provides a vegetarian option, that means turkey — a bird that has been raised to be axed, packaged, and raced to your grocer’s freezer, ultimately to wing its way onto your family’s table. There it…
Greek-born French filmmaker Costa-Gavras has gone after “isms” — fascism, Nazism, imperialism — in vivid political melodramas like Z and Missing, as well as less accomplished, though watchable, movies like Music Box and Amen. The director’s latest tackles capitalism, and the title, Capital, is essentially the only apt thing about…
Recently, Anne Washburn’s astonishing Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play wrapped up a sold-out run at Playwrights Horizons in New York. I saw the show’s world premiere in June 2012 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., where I write about theater. It was one of the most imaginative and…
It’s a dumbfounding irony that the fiction of the “entitled, selfish millennial” was invented by Baby Boomers. The generation that created Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon grew up to be weirdly deaf to irony, and probably won’t even get what a damning metaphor Last Vegas accidentally turns out to…
Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, our critics discuss the upcoming Dallas Buyers Club, the late Lou Reed, 1983’s Get Crazy, 1979’s The Visitor, and 2008’s In Bruges. Matthew McConaughey extends his streak of taking on challenging roles in Dallas Buyers…
With Halloween just around the corner, we know that it’s hard to decide on just one awesome costume. But for those of you who haven’t spent weeks or months planning an epic Halloween costume, and just want something you can put together quickly, we’ve got you covered. These costume ideas…
Miami makes appearances on the big (and little) screen all the time: Real Housewives, Miami Monkey and Bad Girls Club ring a bell? Sadly, most of the above serve to perpetuate tired South Beach stereotypes. This, in turn, leads to more tourists expecting nothing but Brazilian bikinis, daiquiris and house…
The inability to have a child is often treated as a “white people problem,” the province of middle- and upper-class couples who end up resorting to expensive fertility treatments. But Andrew Dosunmu’s supple, observant drama Mother of George puts a different spin on this anguishing issue: A woman who longs…
As the human footprint widens, the movements lumped under “environmentalism” grow ever more varied, which makes a far-reaching documentary about the environmentalist movement — detailing a history from its inception to the present day — a wildly ambitious undertaking. Yet this is the task documentarian Mark Kitchell has assumed in…
“Imagine if marriage didn’t exist, and you’re a guy and you ask someone to get married,” proposes comedian Aziz Ansari in his new Netflix stand-up special, Buried Alive, which premieres November 1. “Hey, so we’ve been hanging out all the time, spending a lot of time together. I want to…
South Florida housing prices are on the rise — Miami-Dade home prices have risen 18 percent since this time last year. Depending on whether you own or are looking to buy, that’s either a really good or really bad thing. If you’re a reality TV producer for the Bravo network,…
Tonight at O Cinema Wynwood, the director and star of Cannon Fodder, Israel’s first zombie movie, will be hosting a one-off screening of their film weeks before it opens in their home country. “We’ve shown it at a few festivals in Israel and there were some people who did not…
In August, Miami was a treated to a live event featuring Mystery Science Theater 3000 alums (now under the RiffTrax brand) riffing over Starship Troopers. This month, the RiffTraxers take on the classic Night of the Living Dead in another live event simulcast to theaters nationwide, including select theaters in…
If you’re a gamer who’s a little more sophisticated than your average Candy Crush player, it’s likely you pledge allegiance to Atari, a pioneer in the world of video games. But do you really know the ins and outs of their groundbreaking beginning? Soon, you can. Two Miamians are taking…
Reports surfaced yesterday that movie director Michael Bay — the Miami-lovin’ man who directed the movie adaptation of the New Times story Pain & Gain, made Megan Fox famous, and, like a cruel yet determined supervillain, inflicts movie theaters across America with a new Transformers sequel every year or two…
Movie magic can be expensive, and even big time directors find themselves strapped for cash when filming a movie. That is the beauty of crowdfunding: ask the fans who would see the flick to help pay for it. If Veronica Mars can raise over $5 million in 30 days, maybe…
Photo by Jaap BuitendijkChiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave.On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson disagree on Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave — a beautifully shot film, contrasting the all-too-visible evil of mankind…
It sounds like an intriguing premise. Sergio (Fele Martínez), an aspiring screenwriter/director, has written a script for a western, but it keeps getting rejected. He’s told it feels ham-fisted and hollow. One would-be producer tells him it lacks a believable, lived-in quality. So Sergio leaves his cowboy-decorated apartment (Playmobil toys…
Being a sensible person, you’ve probably taken a liking to Benedict Cumberbatch — the actor, Dickensian beanpole, and banana-fana name-game destroyer who has lately played everyone literate geeks adore: Sherlock, Smaug, Khan. And, as a sensible person, you probably were curious — even heartened — to hear Cumberbatch would appear…
